maurizio bolognini / intro

maurizio bolognini

Since the 1980s Maurizio Bolognini's works have been exploring the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, and during that time have investigated various dimensions: delegating to machines certain creative functions; generating out-of-control infinities (endless images, inexhaustible voices); the introduction of advanced forms of interactivity, networking and e-democracy; the space-time flows of technological communication, and the interplay of geographical and electronic space.
In 1988, he began to use computers to produce endless streams of images. In the 1990s, he programmed hundreds of machines to generate continuously expanding images and then left them to run indefinitely and without monitors (this work has been exhibited widely in Europe and the U.S.). Since 2000 his work has focused on the possibilities of generative, interactive and public art, in the form of installations which connect some of his Programmed Machines to the mobile phone network, allowing anyone to modify the process of image generation from their own cell phone.

Il lavoro di Maurizio Bolognini esplora le implicazioni sociali e culturali delle nuove tecnologie dagli anni '80, indagando dimensioni diverse: la delega alla macchina di alcune funzioni creative, la generazione di infinità fuori controllo (immagini sconfinate, voci inesauribili), l'introduzione di forme avanzate di interazione del pubblico, il networking e l'e-democracy, i flussi spazio-temporali della comunicazione tecnologica e le interferenze tra spazio geografico e spazio elettronico...
Nel 1988 inizia a usare computer per produrre flussi di immagini inesauribili. Negli anni '90 programma centinaia di macchine che generano immagini in continua espansione, lasciandole funzionare all’infinito e senza monitor (un lavoro esposto in numerose occasioni, in Europa e negli Stati Uniti). Dal 2000 il suo lavoro si concentra sulla possibilità di un'arte generativa, interattiva e pubblica, con installazioni che collegano alcune delle sue Macchine programmate alla rete telefonica mobile, consentendo a chiunque di modificare, dal proprio telefono cellulare, il processo di generazione delle immagini.

These images are part of a continuous, interactive flow of images, which hundreds of machines have been generating for twenty years now.

Interactive installation (Art Palace, Cairo, 2008)

Maurizio Bolognini

Installation of Programmed Machines
(WAHCenter, New York, 2003)

Twenty years ago Bolognini began using computers to generate a flow of continuously expanding random images (Programmed Machines series). In the 1990s he programmed hundreds of these computers and left them to run ad infinitum. Most of these are still working (with or without a screen, with or without audience interactivity).

"The project series Sealed Computers by Maurizio Bolognini point us to what might form the most significant line of force in the field of software-based art......"
Andreas Broeckmann

Installation of Programmed Machines
(Pan-Palazzo delle Arti, Napoli 2005)

Installation of Programmed Machines
(Nice, 1992-98)

About his Programmed Machines Bolognini wrote: "I do not consider myself an artist who creates certain images, and I am not merely a conceptual artist. I am one whose machines have actually traced more lines than anyone else, covering boundless surfaces. I am not interested in the quality of the images produced by my installations but rather in their flow, their limitlessness in space and time, and the possibility of creating parallel universes of information made up of kilometres of images and infinite trajectories. My installations serve to generate out-of-control infinities......"

Maurizio Bolognini

Installation of Programmed Machines
(Neon, Bologna, 2002)

"The box of the computer, stripped of its peripherals, becomes the alter ego of utopian thinking about form......"
Domenico Scudero

"In 2000, I began to connect some of these computers to the mobile phone network. This enabled me to make interactive and multiple installations, connecting various geographically distant locations. In this case the flow of images was made visible by large-scale video-projections and the members of the audience were able to modify their characteristics in real time, by sending new inputs to the system from their own phones. This was done in a similar way to certain applications used in electronic democracy. What I had in mind was art which was generative, interactive and public......."


"Maurizio Bolognini’s work is located in the narrow edge zone that separates the subject’s acceptance of, and surrender to, the preponderance of technology, from the residual determination to strive against it, which remains after all jubilatory human-centric self-illusion has been laid aside [...]. He is in perfect harmony with all our work on the aesthetics of communication and the technological sublime......" Mario Costa
"I must say that my first reading of his work, decidedly atypical compared to the rich bibliography about him, continues to seem to me to be a possible reading, which in some way disregards the position of Bolognini in the constellation of Technological Artists, and brings him back into what is for me the more familiar field of conceptual research and to one of the central themes of Conceptual Art, that of reflection on the great categories of existence, the coordinates of space and time. From Manzoni’s Linea Infinita to On Kawara’s One Million Years, from Anselmo’s Infinito […], the attempts to arrest in an image or in an idea the elusive dimension of space (and thus of time) is a thread running through the artistic research of the latter half of the twentieth century which, in these and other artists, makes use of the categories of the metaphor and the symbol. Maurizio Bolognini’s out-of-control infinities located (provisionally) at the end of this path, where there is a movement […] from the virtuality of the idea to a reality where space and time are truly (although only potentially) infinite......." Sandra Solimano
"Maurizio Bolognini - perhaps sub-conciously - must have some unfinished business with the Irish bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753), who maintained that esse est percipi et percipere, that is to say 'to be is to be perceived and to perceive'. His Sealed Computers will function over a long period of time, but the public eye will only perceive the machine and not the product. […] What allowed a leeway of meaning in what would otherwise be merely a 'manipulation' of signs was the ability to interpret data and results in a geometric context, where with senses like vision and touch, the 'doors of perception', concepts and formulae could be rendered spatially. It was this type of hermeneutics which Berkeley saw as the only way in which the work of a mathematician could be distinguished from that of a simple conjurer and his tricks. But it is this same coupling that here contemporary art is trying to break. The sign forgets, as it were, any established reference......." Giulio Giorello	Installation of Programmed Machines (CACTicino, Switzerland, 2003)

"Museophagia, the name says it all, means the tendency or habit of eating museums. It is something that the Internet is beginning to do right now, or at least it is taking nibbles. The first evidence of museophagia, in fact a kind of digital bulimia, was the attempt of Bill Gates, through a company called Corbys, to gobble up by fact of digitization and scanning all the contents of museums and galleries that Corbys deemed fit, to regurgitate them on line, at a cost, of course, via proprietary channels.
Museophagia, the website and the subject of this book, is more modest in its intentions than those of Bill Gates, it merely purports to consume via digitization objects (furniture, fixtures etc.) that Maurizio Bolognini took from art galleries of various cities, during a world tour starting from the Cavellini Foundation Gallery. Fair game......"
Derrick de Kerckhove

"When I stand before a work by Maurizio Bolognini I feel: [...] contrary to the conviction of what one would call the de-subjectivised, de-passionalised ambit of this post-electronic age, I feel. I see as in a flash the gesture carried out around that time of showing the unshowable, as in the exhibitions le vide and le plein held in Paris at the Gallerie Iris Clert by artists who still thought that the product and not the concept represented the great future challenge. [...] Bolognini, on the other hand, who also thinks of the present world - techno-productive, hard and soft - works at a "decisional" level. He is "political". He handles machines, software, contexts, constituting a paradoxical pattern of "modes of use", and only at the end (at the end of the decision and once the action has been made) will he perhaps clarify or give a glimpse of the non-sense that belongs as much to the work as to the appointed place........"
Simonetta Lux

   Maurizio Bolognini

"Works such as Altavista, Antipodes, and Stanza 11 explore the space-time flows of technological processes, and the interplay of geographical and electronic space......."

      Altavista (Artmedia VI, 1996)

"Au moment où la notion de lieu géographique a du mal à résister aux 'délocalizations', fragmentations ou disséminations tous azimuts des repèrer physiques Maurizio Bolognini, pointe la perte cet élément pourtant constitutive de notre identité. Avec Altavista, 1997, il s'agissait de répliquer le site web de la police de Seattle, en sostituant aux liens de web caméras disséminées dans les différents quartiers de la ville américaine d’autres connexions avec d’autres web caméras placées en différents endroits de différents villes du monde. Continuellement mises à jour, les images donnent donc à voir la perte de lieu et la dématérialisation de la ville post-modern, impossible à vivre quoique parfaitement observables en temps réel. Comme déjà Velasquez en son temps, les peintres avaient su dans le cadre délimité du tableau restituer les diverses orientations et dimensions de l’espace et Internet constitue une nouvelle expression de ce lieu sans lieu, au sein duquel l’espace et le temps sons soumis à des distorsions…" Fred Forest (Art et Internet, Editions Cercle d’Art, Paris 2008)

Maurizio Bolognini



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